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    Brand Planning

    Brand Planting, I mean Planning.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I’m an idea farmer.  A strategic farmer.  I assess the ground, rid it of things that will hinder growth, and then I plant.  I search for the right kind of idea, make sure it’s clean and healthy, and put it into an environment where it can grow strong.  This is what many strategic planners do and where they often stop. 

    Too often planners hand off the idea and let the elements take over.  But ideas need attention. And cultivation. Water and sunshine. They can handle some bad weather, it’s natural,  but this is not a “plant and go” business. There are ideas I have planted for corporations a decade ago that are still growing. Their root systems are strong. Long gone is my paper, but those roots are herculean.

    There are lots of consultants and freelance planners bouncing around who are in it for the invoice. They plant the seeds and go farm elsewhere. Me, I like to stick around and watch what flowers and bears fruit. I like to use those grown nutrients to sustain additional growth. Strategic planners who seed an idea but don’t get involved with the deliverables – aiding other departments to bring the idea to life — are either poorly managed or cowardly.  Life is not easy for an idea farmer.

    If you are in the business of redistributing marketing wealth, growing markets, you need someone who plants and cultivates. Peace!     

    Claim and Proof.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Last week at the DMA/PMN social media conference, Steve Rubel, a digital honcho at Edelman, said “information scales, attention is finite.” He couldn’t be more right.  As social media adds more and more conversation to what is already being said about brands in the marketplace, the cacophony grows louder.  It is in this environment that brand planners become even more important.

    Creating a brand strategy that is easy for corporate officers and consumers to articulate is job one for today’s planners.  Once that strategy is in place, “proving” it and refreshing it is the real work.  Simply repeating the brand strategy — using words, pictures, speeches or song — is not marketing.  Proving it is marketing.  Proof through actions, deeds, and product innovation is what makes a brand strategy and what makes people pay attention…and remember.  If you have a great strategy and no proof, you fail.  Peace!

    Context and Brand Planning.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I was reading today about Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed media piece of art, entitled “Canyon”, and its donation to the MoMA.  One of the arguments by MoMA to the donor family for putting it there vs. The Met was that ther Rauschenberg “combines” were on display there along with combines by other important artists of the period. The logic being MoMA would provide a more contextual setting.

    Context is a keyword for brand planners. We use it when budgets are low. We use it when it’s pregnant with emotional meaning. We mold it sometime, just for the poetry.  As a fairly newly minted brand planner, I look at the craft in context. When I think about the pursuit, I muse over its history, its future, the tools and best practitioners.  I’ve been a brand planner at agencies and as a director of marketing. In both situations the job is to create stimulants for selling. Sustained selling. That takes organization, tough decisions and a tight plan. It also takes oversight. At agencies the stim. is the brief,and oversight of the creative product.  (The latter often doesn’t go well.)  Client side, the stim. is the brief, the selling in and oversight of executive management, direct reports and agents (nicer word than vendors). Can you say herding cats in a marble hallway?    

    My hope as a brand planner is to alter the context of the discipline in marketing.  Just as Margaret Mead insisted that all of her direct reports at the American Museum of Natural Art had psychotherapy – she argued knowing more about yourself has to be healthy – I believe marketing is healthiest when driven by a brand plan. And evolving the marketing craft in that direction, where brand plans are not an afterthought or side-thought, but the fundamental building block is my mission.  In the historic context that is brand planning, my aim is to make it the major organ in the marketing body. Peace!

    PS.  If you don’t comment, I can’t learn.

    Brand Promises and Stereotypes.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Stereotypes are important in marketing because they are patterns.  Many feel that if you play to the patterns, you will win.  Creative directors, on the other hand, have made a living going the other way — staying away from patterns, which is a pattern in itself.

    Stereotyping Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, might suggest she was more likely to assist in the EU bailout because she’s a woman – a mom.  Stereotyping a Long Island Rail Road worker who took retirement with disability at age 50, might portray him as a golf-playing aerobicist, while the reality is he is an arthritic thanks to 30 years keeping the trains moving during winter snowstorms.

    Is someone in Aspen, CO who opens a retailer door and shouts in “Which way to Little Nells?” a New Yorker?   Okay, that one might be accurate – but the reality is stereotypes are nothing more than learning for a brand planner. And as planners if we know “no one wants to be a stereotype.”  It doesn’t mean the consumer wants to be the pioneer who takes the arrows  or the Beta User whose machine gets crapped – it just means when being sold, we want to feel individualized.  The promise has to have promise…not an explicit benefit.  Let consumers’ minds work and process things in their own way. Europeans are better at this type of selling than Americans.  In the U.S. we are very explicit with our ads and social media.

    Sometimes being broad with a promise works harder.  Peace.  

    Taglines as Word Grabs.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I don’t know why colleges don’t get branding. At its most basic a brand starts with a tagline  — a 2 to 5 lyrical “word grab” of company or product intent or mission.  Tagline’s are often campaign ideas written by ad agencies, that are so well received they find their way under the logo. For years. Mostly misunderstood, taglines lock up with logos and lie like faded wallpaper in poorly lit hallways.

    Hofstra University has a new tagline: Pride and Purpose. It’s not 3/4s bad.  I’m pretty sure the word Pride refers to Hofstra’s mascot…a group of lions. Pride is a great motivating word in brand planning – one I chase all the time.  And Purpose is what all great university educations are supposed to engender in students.  The fact is though, when a good tagline does not support the advertising – and I mean every ad – someone is not doing their job.  You can’t tell the world you are all about Pride and Purpose then make a non-supportive, generic claim.  You just can’t do it.  And if you do, the tagline and strategy are either wrong or the leadership is.  Sorry to go all hard butt on Hofstra, but they just came off of 8 years of a campaign called “the edge” which was built around an art director design frame showing an arrow in all the print work.  It’s incredible to me that any academic institution would not know how to create a claim and prove it. And Hofstra is not alone.  The entire college and unversity body of work is abysmal. Peace!

    Kid Healthy Branding.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    v8 fusion

    General Mills and the Campbell Soup Company are doing some really good work to change the poor eating and drinking habits of kids.  General Mills, which already increased the whole grain content in its children’s cereal, has now agreed to reduce sugar in cereals advertised to kids. Campbell’s has created a line of heart healthy sugar and fructose syrup-free V-8 Fusion fruit drinks and marketing them to schools.

    Kids love cereal and they love soda and juice, so if the right products are available, affordable and actually taste good, kids will go for them — reducing obesity and diabetes down the road. 

    I have always loved the marketing ploy of Campbell’s: one V-8 is like multiple servings of vegetables. That idea carries over to its V-8 Fusion and V-8 Splash drinks. It’s a great, focused branding idea — pregnant with healthy consumer imagery (salt aside).  General Mills is trying to make whole grain a differentiating branding idea, but it’s juggling that with a new effort to reduce sugar.  It’s doing the right thing, but dividing its message to conquer. Were I General Mills, I’d work on the whole grain idea and leave the sugar-free as a side bar.  Sugar free is a bandwagon issue, whole grain is big. Peace!

    What does success look like?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    One of the problems with many brand planners is their laser-ike focus on the now. On the current tactical objective. And who can blame them?  Stuff has to work. And be measured. But true brand plans are for the long term, setting direction for all the tactical efforts. The micro measures of success as it were.  Think of a brand plan as the architecture of the house and the individual tactical projects as the decorated rooms. The architecture is the real strategy; the business-winning, business building proposition or organizing principle that drives commerce.

    One of the reasons I love Thomas Friedman, an Op-Ed columnist, is he looks at geopolitical, geo-religious problems before and after the now. He delves into what history has contributing to getting a region where it is (a rearview mirror approach well-worn in brand planning) but also looks into the future. With Syria, for instance, he wonders what the country will look like after the conflagration. He goes straight to a reasonable result and lives there in his mind. Brand planners don’t do this enough. Once you see the future, it helps create a more contextual present.  So the future of healthcare is what? The future of the energy drink category is what? The future of the mobile device operating system is what?

    I’d be a gypsy if I promised the future as a brand planning. But I’d be a goober if I didn’t operate there on behalf of my brands. Peace.

    Tell Me About Your Advertising.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Where the rubber meets the road in my brand strategy practice is in the questions and answers. I have a battery called 24 Questions that revolve around money.  How do you make it? Where does it come from? When competitors get your money, why? Margins? Low hanging fruit? Recurring? You get the idea? When I have answers to these kinds of questions, it’s easier to build a case for strategy when selling senior executives.

    But I use a whole other battery of questions for brand strategy input. Some are sales focused. Others management focused. And others target focused.  For instance, when I’m interviewing cyber security experts, I’m conversing more as a tyro colleague than, say, Uncle Lou at Thanksgiving. That takes some prep.

    Lately, one question I’ve been thinking about asking is “Tell me about your advertising?”  An open-ended question, this presumes a company actually does advertising. People in the marketing dept may be able to answer this question thoughtfully. As may the CFO, who funds it.

    That said, 85% of advertising today is shit.  Most company employees will agree. I can watch TV ads and more often than not haven’t a clue as to the strategy.  Most of it is “See me, here me, touch me.”  Not “Why Me.”  When interviewing lay people about their company/brand advertising, it’s what’s missing that is most telling. Non-advertising people will tell you what the ads should say. And that is input.

    Peace.

     

    Selling Education and Futures.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    There are few things harder to sell than education.  I’ve done some brand planning for universities and the academicians who approve the work are often not equipped for the job. The budgets are also low so good agencies are rarely around and in many cases students, professors and recent grads in-house are at the controls.  Brand strategy is non-existent and everyone promises the same thing: a good life after graduation. The end benefit.  The how to that end benefit is also pretty much the same: great faculty, personal teaching environment, great courses, flah, flah, flah.

    It’s ironic that college and university advertising is so poor because often the experience is one of life’s most powerful. That 4 years has the ability to create a loyalty few jobs can.  Who sleeps in their Met Life tee-shirt 20 years after working there? Two husbands later.

    As we slide out of the difficult economy with new elections upon us and technology flattening the world, the moment is nigh for some serious focus on education.  There are lots of trivial bits flying across the web these days, but only a small percentage are focusing on education. We are already using web tutorials to help us clean bathroom pipes and shower grout, why not improve our SAT scores.  Perhaps things are changing. This morning I noted on Skype an organic chemistry teacher available for $40 an hour (first hour free) and high school math assistance at $.25 a minute. (Do the math.)  

    Web-enabled academia is not the haps yet – not like geolocating your friends at Mary Carrol’s – but it’s coming. And along with that, in time, will come improvements in the branding of higher education institutions.  These times are exciting. Stay tuned. Peace!

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